As the finishing touches are made at the new $90 million home for Michigan State University’s medical school, a capital campaign to help pay for it enters its final stretch.

MSU needs to raise another $2.2 million to cap off a goal of raising $50 million from private donors for the Secchia Center, which opens next month as headquarters for the College of Human Medicine.

The capital campaign received a boost in April when the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation issued a challenge grant to match any further donation with up to $5 million.

MSU has since netted $2.8 million toward meeting the challenge grant and is now entering what Senior Director of Advancement Susan Lane says is the hardest part of the campaign. Donations down the home stretch of campaigns are typically smaller, requiring a higher volume of gifts, Lane said.

“We’re in the crunch time,” she said today as MSU administrators led a media tour of the 180,000-square-foot Secchia Center.

Lane is confident the final, public phase of the capital campaign will conclude successfully.

“We’ve had a lot of generous donors at the higher levels, she said.

Peter Secchia

When it opens next month, the Secchia Center will house 100 first-year and 50 second-year medical students attending the College of Human Medicine. The center is named for Grand Rapids businessman Pete Secchia and his wife, Joan, who, with their friends, arranged a $10 million lead gift to the project in 2008.

MSU has received about 150 separate donations from 150 individuals, alumni, corporations and foundations — mostly from the Grand Rapids area, Lane said.

Much of the amount raised to date came during the difficult economic period of the past two years.

Many donors saw their gift as an investment to help bring the medical school to town as a part of building a major economic sector for Grand Rapids in health care and medical research, Lane said.

“The community really understood it as a critical piece of the vision to make West Michigan both a health destination and to exponentially expand the research component,” she said. “Visionaries in the community really saw this and championed it."

MSU will host a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Secchia Center Sept. 10. A public open house is scheduled for Sept. 11.